Big data - Let's first talk about what is big data, why it's buzzword and who is minting money on Big data.
Business of data -- data helps a business or an organization to make intelligent decision. There are technology systems in place to help business with problems of understanding data for decades. Traditionally these tools are called Reporting and analytics Tools. Can be automated or manual.
Imagine for a minute that you are business owner of a restaurant chain in New York City. You want to find out how happy and satisfied your customers are, where to open next restaurant and how can you reduce raw material cost. All these decisions can't be decided without data. You need a customer survey data to assess customer satisfaction, geo-economic data so that you can decide where to open you're next restaurant and sales data to find out what is popular among your customers.
1. Data Collection ( aka extract transform and load ) -- Extracting data from verity of sources , mobilizing or unlocking data hidden into corporate systems or externally.
There are few players in business of this data mobilization most popular one is Informatica . and then there is IBM and others.
This data mobilization business is changing rapidly . Informatica has been leader in this space and still it is. Informatica is popular ETL tool mostly in Oracle and Teradata shops. ( will oracle acquire informatica one day. thats an interesting question )
I will do a story on informatics products , competition and it's market positioning. Oracle , IBM and Microsoft all have ETL tools. Microsoft ETL tools are getting popular in midsize shops it's free with sql server and easy to find skill set.
There are few other private player in ETL business like Pentaho and Information Builders.
2. Data Storage -- This is where we store all the data for analysis . Oracle and SQL Server has been popular for long. Hadoop( Hbase) is new kid on the block and gaining popularity. Hadoop is suitable for internet size large data sets . It's open source and free . There are some companies making money on Hadoop most of them are private for example Cloudera, Hortonworks , GreenPlum ( now part of EMC )
3. Data Visualization -- We will talk about visualization players like Tableau, QlikTech ..
and Big question is where does niche BI player like Microstrategy and BusinessObjects fits in.
4. Event Detection -- Modern businesses cares about event happening in real time .. so that they can analyze information and make quick decision. A retailer monitors sopping trend in real time to move inventory or decide promotion strategies. Event detection softwares have been in place for long time and they are becoming smarter.. there is category called "complex event processing". Tibco , IBM , Softwage AG are some established player in event market.
Where is an opportunity for making money?
- Who is supplying hardware for all these data ?
- Who is supplying storage disks for mountain of data ..
- Securing data .. which technology is being used to secure all these
- What ab
